Our Trustees play a pivotal role in Fine Cell Work's ongoing journey, and help steer the strategic direction and governance of our charity. They come from a variety of backgrounds and professional experiences - including design and the prison service - but also marketing, finance, communications, business management and consulting, and volunteering.

Jane Mulvagh joined our Board of Trustees in 2024. Here she shares a few words on how she was drawn to Fine Cell Work's mission.

"During a decade working as Vogue’s fashion historian, I interviewed many petites mains, or 'little hands', as the French fashion industry calls the artisans who maintain the traditions and high standards of haute couture. Since 1924, for example, Maison Lesage has trained and perfected the art of embroidery. It is gloriously displayed on haute couture gowns by Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Lacroix and many others and costs tens of thousands of pounds. Interviewing these artisans in their ateliers, I was struck by two things, their contentment and their pursuit of unrivalled excellence. And those two qualities are intertwined. 

A decade later, I was teaching at Central Saint Martins College of Art. While my students may have initially been drawn to the Extreme, the Shocking, the New in fashion, it did not take long for them to appreciate, indeed marvel at, the skilled and dedicated work of these artisans who devoted their working lives to everything that seemed, in an age of fast fashion, so utterly un-modern; long hours embellishing a small piece of cloth, slow fashion, finickity standards invested to create faultless perfection.

You can appreciate, it was not a big leap for me to respond - intellectually and viscerally - to Fine Cell Work’s mission. I had observed for myself the quiet contentment and deep-seated pride that embroidery gives the practitioner.

A non-negotiable cornerstone of our founder, Lady Anne Tree’s, vision was the delivery of this excellence. It provokes wonder, a smile, chest-swelling pride. Such discipline and dignity are there for the taking for those people in the prisons where we operate workshops. Beauty instructs as much as it heals. Prisoners just have to be given a chance and the tuition. With those wings they can fly. 

I was drawn to become a Fine Cell Work trustee because, and not despite the fact that it is a hard sell. Some charities are fortunate in that their work is emotive, be it needy children, medical or disaster appeals or civilian casualties of war. To the man in the street, helping prisoners seems less pressing, ‘less deserving’, that is until you hear of how and why so many have ended up behind bars. And it is the very self-help, self-discipline, mental calm and, for so many, an introduction to the world of beauty at the very core of Fine Cell Work’s programme that convinced me that the hardest sell is often the most long lasting, fruitful and, yes, civilised. 

And to those for whom this is a hard sell, we can deploy hard facts. In Britain, the annual cost of a place in prison is £56,987.* The recidivism rate stands at around 28 per cent**. Should lives be wasted passing 23 hours a day in a cell achieving nothing? Should our taxes fund a merry-go-round of reoffending? Hard facts. So Fine Cell Work is not such a hard sell. It is blindingly obvious, I would suggest."

*Public sector expenditure on prisons in the United Kingdom from 2010/10 to 2024/25, Statista

**Proven reoffending statistics: July to September 2023 (Revised), www.gov.uk